eDPI Calculator

Two settings control how your aim actually moves: your mouse’s DPI and your in-game sensitivity. Neither means anything alone — 800 DPI at 2.0 sens plays identically to 1600 DPI at 1.0. The product of the two is eDPI (effective DPI), the single number that describes your aim speed, travels between games and mice, and fills every pro player’s settings sheet. Enter your DPI and sensitivity: this calculator returns your eDPI, your centimetres per 360-degree turn, and where you sit against the ranges the pros actually use — the three numbers worth writing down before you change any hardware.

Why the Product Is the Only Honest Number

A mouse sensor reports counts per inch of travel — that is DPI. A game multiplies incoming counts by its sensitivity setting (and its yaw constant) to produce view rotation. So the chain from hand to screen contains the two numbers multiplied, never separately: double the DPI and halve the sensitivity and the cursor's journey is bit-for-bit identical. This is why settings sheets, pro databases and aim coaches all quote eDPI = DPI × sensitivity, and why copying a pro's "0.5 sensitivity" without their 800 DPI copies nothing at all. The product's other virtue is portability: buy a new mouse, change its DPI, and one division restores your exact old feel — sens_new = eDPI ÷ DPI_new. Muscle memory is stored in the product; the calculator exists to keep the factors straight.

Worked Example: The Professional's 800

The defaults are an archetypal professional configuration in tactical shooters: 800 DPI × 1.0 sensitivity = eDPI 800, squarely inside the Counter-Strike professional cluster (roughly 600–1,200). In a Source-engine game (yaw 0.022 degrees per count), a full 360° turn takes 360/(800 × 0.022) ≈ 20.5 inches of mouse travel — 51.9 cm per 360. That number, cm/360, is the physically honest version of eDPI: how much desk a complete turn costs. It explains the furniture of the profession — the 45 cm+ mousepad, the arm-aiming posture, the low-sens bargain (a full turn is a committed sweep; a one-pixel adjustment is easy). Contrast the ends: halve to eDPI 400 and the turn costs 103.9 cm, sniper-specialist territory; double to 1600 and a turn costs 26 cm with a wrist doing the work, while micro-corrections start to overshoot. Neither extreme is "correct" — the ranges printed by the calculator describe where competitive populations have settled for their game's movement and time-to-kill — but any serious change should be made in the product's terms, 10–15% at a time, not by swapping one factor blindly.

The Yaw Caveat: eDPI Does Not Cross Games Cleanly

Honesty requires the asterisk the calculator's yaw select exists for: eDPI comparisons travel between games only if the games share a yaw constant — the degrees of view rotation per mouse count at sensitivity 1. Source-engine titles use 0.022; Valorant's sensitivity scale is built on roughly 0.07 degrees per count (which is why Valorant sensitivities look tiny and its eDPI figures — DPI × sens on that scale — land in the same few-hundreds range by coincidence of design); Overwatch, Apex and others each bring their own rulers, and scoped weapons multiply further by zoom-specific factors. The robust universal currency is cm/360, measurable with a ruler in any game: set the new game until a 360 costs the same centimetres, and the aim is home regardless of the local arithmetic. Players who convert by eDPI alone between different-yaw games are carrying banknotes between currencies at a 1:1 rate because the notes look similar.

Finding Your Number

Method, briefly, since the calculator's ranges invite the question. Start inside your game's professional band (tactical FPS: roughly 200–450 on Valorant's scale, 600–1,200 on CS's; faster hero shooters run higher on their own scales). Test with a structured drill — the classic is the 180°/flick-and-track circuit on an aim trainer — for several days per candidate, changing one step of about 10% at a time: aim adaptation is real, and same-day judgements mostly measure novelty. Weigh the trade the physics imposes: lower eDPI buys micro-precision and calm tracking at the price of large, slower repositioning movements; higher buys situational agility at the price of pixel-level jitter. Players with small pads or wrist posture are physically capped at the higher bands — the desk votes before the preference does. And once settled, record the eDPI and cm/360 together: the pair survives hardware changes, game changes and years, which is the entire reason this page reduces your settings to them.

Two Conversions, Walked Through

The arithmetic earns its keep in the two moves players actually make. New mouse: you play 400 DPI at sensitivity 2.0 (eDPI 800) and the new mouse feels best at 1600 DPI — the sensitivity that preserves your aim exactly is 800 ÷ 1600 = 0.5, and not one drill needs relearning. New game: carry the worked example's 51.9 cm/360 from CS to Valorant — the yaw select does the conversion, but the manual route is: a 360 costing 20.45 inches at Valorant's 0.07 yaw needs eDPI = 360 ÷ (20.45 × 0.07) ≈ 251, so at 800 DPI the Valorant sensitivity is ≈ 0.31. Players who instead copy their CS sensitivity of 1.0 into Valorant arrive at eDPI 800 on that game's scale — a 16 cm/360 whirlwind — and conclude, wrongly, that the game "feels different". It doesn't; the currency changed, and this page is the exchange bureau.

The Ruler Test: Verify Everything on Your Desk

Every figure on this page can be audited with a ruler, and serious players do it once per setup: place the mouse at the pad's left edge, swipe until the view has turned exactly one full revolution back to a landmark, and measure the distance travelled. That is your true cm/360 — the number that absorbs sensor error, surface effects, driver scaling and every vendor's optimistic DPI labelling into one physical fact. If it disagrees with the calculator's figure, believe the ruler and adjust sensitivity until the measured turn matches the intended one (operating systems' pointer settings must be at their neutral, un-accelerated positions for the measurement to mean anything in game). Aim is physical before it is digital; the calculator's job is to make the physical setting reproducible, and the ruler is its final examiner.

Related Tools

More from the Other Calculators hub: the Hamming Distance Calculator for the information-theory corner, and the live Upload Time Calculator for the other number gamers argue about.

Frequently Asked Questions

What eDPI do CS2 pros use?

On the CS scale (DPI × in-game sensitivity, yaw 0.022), the professional distribution clusters roughly between 600 and 1,200 eDPI, with the median near 800 — the worked example's figure — and AWPers typically in the lower half, entry fraggers higher. Valorant professionals, on that game's own scale, cluster near 200–450. The spread within a single team can be twofold, which is the strongest evidence that the band matters more than any point inside it.

Is higher DPI with lower sensitivity smoother?

In principle, marginally: at the same eDPI, higher DPI samples the hand's motion more finely, so the game's per-count rotation is smaller and movement can render a touch smoother, particularly at high polling rates. In practice the effect is subtle, some sensors behave best at native steps, and input-latency folklore on the topic exceeds the evidence — choose DPI for sensor behaviour and desktop comfort, then divide to your eDPI; do not contort the factors for a theoretical smoothness you cannot feel in a blind test.

Why is my Valorant eDPI so different from my CS eDPI?

Because the sensitivity scales encode different yaw constants — Valorant's sens unit is worth roughly 0.07°/count against Source's 0.022°, so identical physical aim produces sensitivity numbers about three times smaller in Valorant (a Valorant 277 eDPI and a CS 880 eDPI both measure about 47 cm per 360 — the same aim in two currencies). Convert through cm/360 — this calculator's second output — and the mystery dissolves into unit conversion, which it always was.

What is cm/360 and why do players quote it?

The physical distance the mouse must travel for one full in-game revolution: cm/360 = 360 ÷ (eDPI × yaw) × 2.54. It is the only sensitivity figure that is identical in meaning across every game, mouse and monitor, because it lives in the physical world — and the only one that tells you whether your mousepad is big enough for your settings. Quote it alongside eDPI and your aim becomes portable forever.

Does FOV change my eDPI?

It changes the feel, not the figure: eDPI governs view rotation per count regardless of field of view, but at wider FOV the same rotation sweeps more visual content, and scoped/zoomed states usually apply their own multiplier (a "zoom sensitivity" ratio) on top. Players sensitive to the distinction set zoom ratios so that cm-per-screen-width matches across scopes — an advanced refinement built on this page's foundation, not a replacement for it.

Should I copy a pro's exact eDPI?

Copy their band, not their point. A pro's eDPI encodes their posture, pad, role, grip and ten thousand hours of adaptation; the transferable content is the range their game and role has converged on. Start mid-band, drill, adjust in small steps as the method section describes — the number you arrive at will typically sit within 20% of theirs, and it will be yours, which is the part that performs.